From the Las Vegas Review-Journal
Harry Belafonte couldn't have imaginted it would come to this.
The Calypso crooner couldn't have pictured the day when his 1956 hit "The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" would be rewritten by a team of Las Vegas disc jockeys into a patriotic parody of Osama bin Laden.
And that an Australian animations company would hear the song and create a "South Park"-style cartoon to act as accompaniment, featuring a bongo-playing President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell on vocals.
Or that the cartoon version of the "Bin Laden Bomb Song" would end up on a popular Los Angeles-based Web site, from whence it has been downloaded and forwareded to office cubicles around the free world - 10million times at last count.
Or that Rolling Stone magazine would write about it and that the song would become popular enough that on a breezy Tuesday morning a crew from the "Today" show cwould come to the radio station wher eit all started to record this peculiar moment in histroy, their cambera rolling as Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman took a whack at a cardboard pinata bearing The Evil One's likeness. (bin laden)
The morning team of Craig Williams, Andy Kaye and "Sweet" Al Miller of KOMP-FM, 92.3 radio station along with producer Doublas Marsh, the folks who wrote the parody, are quite surprised, too.
"It was the first time we put one of our songs on the Web," said Miller, a Chicago native whoe provided the vocals and mixed the song in his home recording studio. Previous song parodies had been posted on the Web, but never in a form that could be downloaded Miller said.
"It's kind of scary," Miller said of the worldwide response to the song.
In post-Sept. 11 America, where comedians walk with trepidation lest they strike the wrong chord, the "Bin Laden Bomb Song" has become a minor cultural phenomenon. It has ben played on radio statoins from coast to coast. Besides being on the "Today" show, the foursome has been interviewed by CNN, National Public Radio and teh British Broadcasting Corp.
Television stations in Thailand have aired the cartoon, Miller said. But it's on the Internet that the song has won its biggest audience. While radio song parodies are nothing new, until recently they were limited to local audiences unless a station went to the trouble of recording an album.
"It's an Internet phenomenon, and it's unbelievable," Miller said.
It was Kaye, the station's news and public affairs director, who came up with the idea to write a parody when he notiece the similarity between the words "Taliban" and "Tally-Man" from Belafonte's classic.
It took just over an hour to record, and it made its debut Sept. 18, one week after the terrorists struck the Pentagon and the WTC.
But it wasn't until the Australian compay Oska Software added a cartoon to create a web-based music video that the song became an international hit. Now Lotus Broadcating, which owns the station, is negotiating to market the song on a CD along with some of the gruop's other parody tunes. Proceeds from the sale would be donated to charity, company vice predident Tony Bonniel said...
...
...The publicity may have reached its apex Tuesday morning, when Goodman showed up to take the inaugural whack at a "bin Laden pinata" as a "Today" show crew looked on. Just before heading outside to do the deed, Goodman caugt a glimpse of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on a TV monitor.
It was a quiet reminder of the tragedy that made the moment possible, and the different roles that leaders play when the world has been turned upside down.
"Look at Giuliani," Goodman said. "He's a responsible guy talking about responsible things. And I'm hitting a pinata."
article by Jan Moller, Review-Journal
The "Bin Laden Bomb Song" phenomenon
